"Strait-laced" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... business. For Dr. Upround, possessing as he did great influence with Robin, and shocked as he was by what Carroway had said, refused to have anything more to do with his most distinguished parishioner until he should forsake his ways. And for this he must not be thought narrow-minded, strait-laced, or unduly dignified. His wife quite agreed with him, and indeed had urged it as the only proper course; for her motherly mind was uneasy about the impulsive nature of Janetta; and chess-men to her were dolls, without even the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... who is not strait-laced, who loves a pretty girl, a bottle, and a jolly companion, he is the very thing. He is also a past master in gastronomy, and a connoisseur in voluptuousness generally. He was educated at Athens, and has served royalty in Sicily ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... talked of our coming here,' said Shelldrake. 'Here we're alone and unhindered; and if the plan shouldn't happen to work well (I don't see why it shouldn't though), no harm will be done. I've had a deal of hard work in my life, and I've been badgered and bullied so much by your strait-laced professors, that I'm glad to get away from the world for a spell, and talk and do ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... think men ought to propose them unless they are quite sure of their company. Maybe I'm wrong, and I often feel that I am strait-laced about such things. It is so odd to me that men cannot amuse themselves without pitting themselves against each other. When a man tells me that he can shoot better than I, I tell him that my keeper can ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... many. He and Hawthorne were both fishermen, and the two used to set themselves afloat in the summer afternoons. "Strange and happy times were those," exclaims the more distinguished of the two writers, "when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any less conventional race, during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Acton, very seriously, "I've been an arrant cad since I've come to St. Amory's, and if those horses hadn't bolted with your mater I should never have seen in you anything but a strait-laced prig, as I've all along thought you. I have, really. But that's all changed now, and I'm going to dry up. I suppose you know you aren't popular among the ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... tries openly to reform and guide them—if I should say plainly, Such and such are your faults; such and such places and associations are full of danger—they would be angry or disgusted, or they would say I was blue and strait-laced, and had an old woman's notions of what a man should be. I must coax them, as you say; I must disguise my medicines, and apply my remedies almost without their knowing it. I also find it true in my practice that tonics and good wholesome diet are better than all moral drugs. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe |
